Orders

Create an order directly — for phone/email orders or anything that didn’t come through a quote.

From an order’s Production panel you raise work orders per line — they appear under Work Orders.

Invoicing or shipping while stock is short (or a linked job is still open) warns first — you can proceed, but knowingly.

Short means short of available stock — on hand minus what other open orders have reserved. Acknowledging an order reserves its parts; the line table shows “allocated 3 of 5” and the Production card's stock-allocation block lets you allocate what has since arrived or reserve the full quantity anyway. Shipping or cancelling releases the reservation.

Invoices issued per order are tracked together under Invoicing.

Every order has a staff-only remark at the top of its page, echoed beside the next-step button. It is internal only — never on the invoice, delivery docket or portal.

When a line is a serial-tracked item, despatch records exactly which serials left on that order and lists them on the order page. A warranty or recall question later starts from here: which units, from which lot or job, went to which customer.

Money going back to a customer is recorded on the order’s Payments card as a refund, with the method, a reference and a reason. Tick Issue a credit note and a numbered credit note PDF is generated against the invoice, filed under the order’s documents (the customer sees it beside their invoice) and attached to the refund email. Refunds made in Stripe arrive by themselves — partial or full — and a full refund closes the order as Refunded.

• Refund due appears on the Payments card whenever more has been received than the order now totals — after a downward invoice amendment, or an over-payment — and stays until the refund is recorded.
• A refund never touches the credit line: the payment being refunded already restored it.
• Refunds can be recorded on cancelled orders too — that is exactly when a bank-paid order needs one.

Cancelling (or refunding) an order asks for a reason and, by default, undoes what the order set in motion: stock despatched with it is booked back into the location it left — as Return movements, with the same lots and serials — and the order’s draft and released work orders are cancelled with their issued materials returned. Either can be unticked. Jobs already in progress are left alone and named in the warning so you can stop them from Work orders.

• Cancelled, refunded and completed orders are closed — the status control offers no way back (a completed order can still be refunded).
• The reason and everything that was returned or cancelled show in the order’s recent activity.
• Whether the customer is emailed on cancellation follows the status email matrix in Settings.

Converting an approved quote asks how it ships — delivery, or customer pickup / own freight — and where. Delivery goes to the billing address on file unless you untick that and enter a delivery address. Pickup removes the quoted freight and recalculates tax at the quote’s own rate, so the order total is what the customer actually pays.

A customer can ask to cancel an order from their portal while it is still with you — received, acknowledged, in production, under review, at QC or invoiced. Once shipped it is a return. The ask arrives as a banner on the order with their reason, a tile on the dashboard and a marker in the list; the order itself does not change until you act. Cancel it and the usual cancel flow runs — stock and jobs unwound, customer emailed. Decline, with a short explanation, and the order continues; the customer is emailed that it cannot be cancelled and why.

The documents card on the order handles both the proforma and the tax invoice: preview the PDF, then Generate & attach to mint the numbered document and file it for the customer, then email it — to the accounts email on file for the organisation, or the order contact when there is none. Generating the tax invoice is what invoices the order (and charges the credit line on account); a preview mints nothing. An order moved to Invoiced by status can have its PDF generated here afterwards.

• A note typed above the standard footer is printed on that invoice only.
• Every PDF the system produces — invoices, quotes, purchase orders, receipts, dockets, certificates, count sheets and statements — carries its document number and “page x of y” on each page.